We are all born with a desire to talk and to be talked to. Most of us find talking a pleasant experience and we do it more often for pleasure than for necessity. Listening to other people talk and thereby sharing their emotional experiences is also a desire we are born with and this desire has been exploited in motion picture film and television in which voice sounds are now essential. But until recently, voice sounds were seldom used in video games or were used as an optional gimmick to add a little realism to the game, rather than to simulate dialog. The large amount of memory required for good quality voice sounds has made voice impractical for home video games, until recently. But now lower memory prices and digital disks such as the CD-ROM and compression techniques have made talking video games practical.
But adding voice sounds to conventional video games is not enough to simulate a face to face voice conversation. A talking video game called Thayer's Quest was attempted in 1984 and was played from an analog laser-readable video disc. One of the reasons for the commercial failure of Thayer's Quest was that each spoken sentence was programmed to accompany only one sequence of video frames. Since the video was not compressed, the maximum amount of play time was limited to about half an hour which was further reduced to a fraction of that by the branching story. Hence, only a few minutes of voice sounds were actually heard during the game. Whenever a human player saw a certain video character, the character always spoke the same words. This greatly reduced the entertainment value of the game. Another consequence of programming the audio and video to be inseparable, was that branching scenes were not distinguished from branching dialog. Human players were able to navigate through a maze of roads, but the game play did not feel like a conversational dialog. It was more like "Which road do you want to take next: (1 ) or (2) or (3)? Make your selection." Talking video games will be much more entertaining if each scene has a rich variety of possible dialog sequences.
Talking video games are disclosed in my U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,305,131; 4,333,152; 4,445,187 and 4,569,026.
Another problem in the prior art is how to prevent a combinatorial explosion, i.e. an exponential increase of scenes if each branch branches, and each of those branch, etc. If branches did not merge or loop, the limited amount of bytes on the CD-ROM would be quickly exhausted after less than a dozen branches. Branches should usually merge with other branches or loop back to prior scenes. But this does not mean that repeated scenes should play exactly the same each time. Each time a scene is repeated there should be different dialog and/or different characters. Successful games of the past have made use of a rich variety of possible plays against a simple repetitive background. Chess has been popular for centuries with only a very basic checkered background. Pac-Man did quite well even though it had only a simple background maze. Recent video games also make use of a repetitive background. The reason these games have high play value is the large variety of possible plays and sequences of plays in each situation. And so it should be with talking video games.
It is common practice in the video game art for stories to branch. It is also common practice for digital data of animated characters to be stored separately from background scenery and to generate each frame of an animated picture from both the background data and the character data to minimize the number of stored images.
It is well known for human players to input choices using any of a variety of input devices such as push buttons, rotatable knobs, pressure sensitive membrane, proximity sensitive pads or screen overlay, light pen, light sensitive gun, joy stick, mouse, track ball, moving a cursor or crosshairs or scrolling through highlighted options, speech recognition, etc.
In the prior art, each choice by the human can be immediately followed by a synthesized voice or digitized voice recording that speaks the words selected by the human player, so the human will quickly adjust to the fact that the spoken words he hears for his side of the dialog are initiated by his fingers rather than his vocal cords.
The characters in video games and computer games, especially role-playing games, are of two types: player-controlled characters (or player characters) and non-player characters. A player-controlled character is a human player's animated surrogate or proxy and does what the human player chooses to have him do. Non-player characters are not directly controlled by a human player, but can be indirectly influenced by a human player, either by responding to input from a human player or by responding to what a player-controlled character does or says.
The prior art also includes methods for generating video images of moving lips and facial expressions on a talking head or other animated character. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,884,972 issued Dec. 5, 1989 to Elon Gasper who contemplates use in video games.
The film and television industries already address the human desire to watch and listen to important and interesting people. But there is also a basic human desire that people respond to us as individuals. No industry yet satisfies this desire that important people reply to us as individuals. Although the telephone provides a partial satisfaction of our desire to talk with other people, it is necessarily limited to living people who are willing to talk with us. Historical and imaginary people cannot talk with us and famous living people don't want to. Hence, there is is a strong but unfulfilled human desire waiting to be satisfied by new technology.
Often an illusion is as satisfying as a real experience, as any TV viewer knows. When you watch people on TV, what you are actually watching are little flickering dots of colored light from a chemically coated sheet of glass. The voice sounds you hear are from a vibrating cone of paper. That is reality. The rest of your experience is illusion. But it is an illusion that everyone wants to experience and will gladly pay money for. The desire to talk with interesting, charismatic and famous people is also strong and millions of people will be satisfied with an illusion of such conversations.
Talking video games (talkies) will change the nature of video games as dramatically as talking pictures changed silent film. Talkies will let users chat with images of famous people (living or historical or imaginary) and with animal-like characters, and participate in simulated adventures and dramas with interesting characters who talk to each player responsively. The conversations will be one-sided, of course, with the on-screen characters doing most of the talking. But talkies that stir human emotions like dramatic films will have lasting appeal, because they will satisfy a basic human desire, the desire to talk with other people.